She was my fantasy in high school–homecoming queen, top of the class, three different sports. Now my fantasy had come true and Miss Thing cleaned my house every weekend, turned her paychecks over to me, and begged to eat me out all in ratty reminders of her high school glory days.
Tips on how to study a STEM subject, from a physics student
1. Go to class
Going to class and paying attention is key in this kind of subjects. I used to think that if I just read the notes I would understand the same, but this is a mistake. It took me way longer to grasp the concepts than if I had simply listened to my professor.
2. Understand the theory
I thought that jumping straight into doing exercises was easier to do and would prepare me for the exam, but this is a mistake. I found myself struggling with most problems just because I hadn’t understood the theory behind them.
3. Exercises
When you feel that you get the concepts you can jump into the exercises. Do as many as you can, and try to really understand where you make mistakes and how your teacher’s solutions differ from yours. I recommend you do them when the exam is close, so you have all of them fresh in your memory.
4. Practice exams
This is the last thing you should do before the exam, and it is optional, just do it if you are really pushing for that A. Pretend it’s a real one and it will really make you feel confident when the actual day comes.
Here’s the harmful history of the puzzle piece symbol and why autistic people don’t use it anymore ♾
Schnumn (you can find her across many platforms!) and I worked together on an informative comic for the Autistic Comic Takeover!
[ID: A multi-panel comic done in a cartoon style with black lineart.
Panel 1: Our narrator, a white person with glasses, brown hair, and a purple t-shirt, gestures to a cascade of blue puzzle pieces in the top right corner of the panel. A couple cartoon faces below look where they are pointing. In a speech bubble, they say,
“The symbol that is most commonly associated with autism is the puzzle piece symbol. It is used widely by allistics* who want to show support for autistic people.”
*non-autistics
Panel 2: The narrator uses a pointer to point to a sign showing the blue puzzle piece with a red x over it.
“Some autistic people identify with the puzzle piece, but most of us don’t.
We’ve been advocating against its use for a long time now.”
Panel 3: The narrator stands in a white panel, looking to the side, with their hands in front of their chest. In a speech bubble, they say:
“There are many reasons why…”
Around them are yellow bubbles that read:
“It is an infantalising symbol.”
“It has been used to stigmatize us for decades; implying that we are a puzzle to be solved and/or that we have missing pieces.”
“It was created for us by allistics and we didn’t get a choice.”
“…There is also a long, ableist history behind it. ”
Panel 4: A red ribbon header reads :“Ableist History Timeline.” Below are yellow bubbles connected together to form a timeline, each year with its own bubble. Between the bubbles are variations of the puzzle piece symbol: a half-green, half-black puzzle piece with a stylized crying child in the middle, a ribbon with red, yellow, green and blue puzzle pieces, and the blue puzzle piece. The narrator is in the bottom left corner, looking at the timeline.
1963: “The puzzle piece symbol was created by Gerald Gasson of the National Autistic Society. The N. A. S. believed that autistic people suffered from a ‘puzzling condition’ and so they invented a symbol for autism - a weeping child in the shape of a puzzle piece.”
1999: “The autism society of America creates the puzzle piece ribbon to raise awareness for autism. Unfortunately, they sought to cure autism through ‘early intervention’ and applied behavioural analysis (aba) - which can be accurately summed up as conversion therapy for autistics.”
2022: “The organization Autism Speaks continues to use the puzzle piece to this day on their website and beyond. To them, it represents the 'search for answers’ that will lead to a grater understanding of autistic people.
“Unfortunately, the answers they’re searching for are treatments and cures. but autism does not need to be 'cured’ or 'treated’.
"Many of the harmful beliefs about autism that continue to this day have been perpetuated by Autism Speaks, and they make it harder for autistics to be heard.”
Panel 5: The narrator looks with a distressed expression at a round cartoon person holding a poster with the blue puzzle piece on it.
“Information regarding the puzzle piece symbol and why we don’t use it is all widely available online and regularly discussed in autism communities both offline and online.
"When we see allies continue to use the puzzle piece symbol, even though we want to assume they mean well when they use it, it gives us the impression that they aren’t listening to us. As a result, we don’t feel safe around them.”
Panels 6 & 7: “Many autistic people have been advocating for the use of the symbols we chose for ourselves.”
Panel 6 shows a rainbow infinity symbol (sideways figure-eight).
“The Rainbow Infinity Symbol. This was created to combat the puzzle piece by "Aspies for Freedom,"who are a controversial group by today’s standers of autism acceptance. The two autistic women who made the symbol currently disagree as to whether it represents all neurodiversity or only autism.”
Panel 7 shows the gold infinity symbol, with the narrator looking up at it from the bottom right corner. In a speech bubble, they say:
“Gold is 'Au’ in the periodic table so we use the gold infinity for autism.”
Panel 8: The narrator stands in the middle of the panel, hands on hips. Their eyes are close and they are smiling as they talk. There is a little star next to their head.
Below them and behind them, and rainbow-colored crowd is smiling and holding up posters with the infinity symbol on them.
“When you use the symbols that we’ve chosen for ourselves, we feel that our voices are being heard and that we’re behing seen as our own people with agency.
"We are people, not puzzles; and there should be nothing about us without us!”
Research Director Mari Tervaniemi from the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Educational Sciences investigated, in cooperation with researchers from the Beijing Normal University (BNU) and the University of Turku, the link in the brain between language acquisition and music processing in Chinese elementary school pupils aged 8–11 by monitoring, for one school year, children who attended a music training programme and a similar programme for the English language. Brain responses associated with auditory processing were measured in the children before and after the programmes. Tervaniemi compared the results to those of children who attended other training programmes.
“The results demonstrated that both the music and the language programme had an impact on the neural processing of auditory signals,” Tervaniemi says.
Learning achievements extend from language acquisition to music
Surprisingly, attendance in the English training programme enhanced the processing of musically relevant sounds, particularly in terms of pitch processing.
“A possible explanation for the finding is the language background of the children, as understanding Chinese, which is a tonal language, is largely based on the perception of pitch, which potentially equipped the study subjects with the ability to utilise precisely that trait when learning new things. That’s why attending the language training programme facilitated the early neural auditory processes more than the musical training.”
Tervaniemi says that the results support the notion that musical and linguistic brain functions are closely linked in the developing brain. Both music and language acquisition modulate auditory perception. However, whether they produce similar or different results in the developing brain of school-age children has not been systematically investigated in prior studies.
At the beginning of the training programmes, the number of children studied using electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings was 120, of whom more than 80 also took part in EEG recordings a year later, after the programme.
In the music training, the children had the opportunity to sing a lot: they were taught to sing from both hand signs and sheet music. The language training programme emphasised the combination of spoken and written English, that is, simultaneous learning. At the same time, the English language employs an orthography that is different from Chinese. The one-hour programme sessions were held twice a week after school on school premises throughout the school year, with roughly 20 children and two teachers attending at a time.
“In both programmes the children liked the content of the lessons which was very interactive and had many means to support communication between the children and the teacher” says Professor Sha Taowho led the study in Beijing.
We remember things longer if we take breaks during learning, referred to as the spacing effect. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology gained deeper insight into the neuronal basis for this phenomenon in mice. With longer intervals between learning repetitions, mice reuse more of the same neurons as before – instead of activating different ones. Possibly, this allows the neuronal connections to strengthen with each learning event, such that knowledge is stored for a longer time.
Many of us have experienced the following: the day before an exam, we try to cram a huge amount of information into our brain. But just as quickly as we acquired it, the knowledge we have painstakingly gained is gone again. The good news is that we can counteract this forgetting. With expanded time intervals between individual learning events, we retain the knowledge for a longer time.
But what happens in the brain during the spacing effect, and why is taking breaks so beneficial for our memory? It is generally thought that during learning, neurons are activated and form new connections. In this way, the learned knowledge is stored and can be retrieved by reactivating the same set of neurons. However, we still know very little about how pauses positively influence this process – even though the spacing effect was described more than a century ago and occurs in almost all animals.
Learning in a maze
Annet Glas and Pieter Goltstein, neurobiologists in the team of Mark Hübener and Tobias Bonhoeffer, investigated this phenomenon in mice. To do this, the animals had to remember the position of a hidden chocolate piece in a maze. On three consecutive opportunities, they were allowed to explore the maze and find their reward – including pauses of varying lengths. “Mice that were trained with the longer intervals between learning phases were not able to remember the position of the chocolate as quickly,” explains Annet Glas. “But on the next day, the longer the pauses, the better was the mice’s memory.”
During the maze test, the researchers additionally measured the activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex. This brain region is of particular interest for learning processes, as it is known for its role in complex thinking tasks. Accordingly, the scientists showed that inactivation of the prefrontal cortex impaired the mice’s performance in the maze.
“If three learning phases follow each other very quickly, we intuitively expected the same neurons to be activated,” Pieter Goltstein says. “After all, it is the same experiment with the same information. However, after a long break, it would be conceivable that the brain interprets the following learning phase as a new event and processes it with different neurons.” However, the researchers found exactly the opposite when they compared the neuronal activity during different learning phases. After short pauses, the activation pattern in the brain fluctuated more than compared to long pauses: In fast successive learning phases, the mice activated mostly different neurons. When taking longer breaks, the same neurons active during the first learning phase were used again later.
Memory benefits from longer breaks
Reactivating the same neurons could allow the brain to strengthen the connections between these cells in each learning phase – there is no need to start from scratch and establish the contacts first. “That’s why we believe that memory benefits from longer breaks,” says Pieter Goltstein.
Thus, after more than a century, the study provides the first insights into the neuronal processes that explain the positive effect of learning breaks. With spaced learning, we may reach our goal more slowly, but we benefit from our knowledge for much longer. Hopefully, we won’t have forgotten this by the time we take our next exam!
You know how articles reporting on psycholinguistic experiments often say something like ‘X number of people took part but Y number of people’s results were discounted for various reasons…didn’t understand the instructions, wasn’t paying attention, was generally incompetent…’, well now I can say I have probably just been admitted to that inevitable and illustrious group of rejected data-providers.
First, I did some example tests to get used to the computer and the instructions for the task which involved learning a made-up language. That was all well and good. Then I started the experiment proper. I was plugging away at the exercises, tapping here, tapping there as required until the researcher came in mid-way and told me, in a kindly, roundabout sort of way, that I was being too slow (it was meant to be a short-term memory test after all)!
After that, I sped up as best I could. After the first short-term memory part, I moved on to the second long-term memory one. Essentially they were testing to see what kinds of rules I had learned from part 1. After the experiment there was a quick interview-like section where the experimenter asked me to describe the rules I had learned from the exercises and what I thought this made-up language was. Now here’s the bizarre bit…I correctly spotted that the made-up language was essentially an ergative language - hooray! However, virtually all the rules that I had been using during the experiment (and consequently my answers) were completely wrong!
It turns out they are testing whether certain alignments (e.g. ergative alignment or accusative alignment or some unattested one) are equally learnable or not. I reckon their null hypothesis will be that unattested and attested systems are equally learnable with the aim of demonstrating that typologically-unattested systems are harder to learn. Evidently I find even attested systems hard to learn! I suppose (and hope, for dignity’s sake!) that in every experiment there’s always one such person!
As Bronk and Peter approached the flock of geese, they were greeted with a chorus of honks and hollering. The lead goose banked towards them, cutting easily through the high winds that Peter dared not attempt alone. “Oi there friend!” The lead goose cried, piercing the air. “Looking for a flock to join? Ain’t too many of us, but the winds are still that much easier to–” The goose did a double-take, nearly wing-slapping his rear compatriot. “Bronk!? Is that you, brother?!” Bronk laughed, and all the other geese joined in as they moved closer. Peter quickly saw that their family colors matched those of his friend’s–rich maroon; brilliant orange. Well, all except the rakish red of their business gear. “You always were the perceptive one, Tronk!” Bronk hollered back. Tronk ululated with delight. “Well I’ll be plucked! I thought you’d given up migration, what with the songbird business plans!” “Oh, they’re going strong–cargo is a booming field back in the mountains of Remex! In fact, let me introduce you to the genius who came up with the idea…” — Old friends, new joys New songs in an old voice Black ink, color bright Tales by day and songs by night–
Oh, come with me to those Remex places, And hear the myths of her feathered races.
Citizen: *goes to college, accumulates at least tens of thousands of dollars in debt, almost burns out*
HR interviewer: You’ve got the education, but we’re not sure you have the knowledge and experience necessary for this line of work.
Citizen: I also…. Know how, to…. use Excel(?)
Interviewer: *trying to hide massive work-boner while noticeably sweating* Go on….
Lmaoooooo true. Reblogging for those looking to add marketable skills to their applications
This is being reblogged on my main. Learning Excel, even at my basic level (I don’t know how to do most of the above), has made me far more employable as well. I’m probably the biggest Luddite on this site too. If I can learn it you can too.
Citizen: *goes to college, accumulates at least tens of thousands of dollars in debt, almost burns out*
HR interviewer: You’ve got the education, but we’re not sure you have the knowledge and experience necessary for this line of work.
Citizen: I also…. Know how, to…. use Excel(?)
Interviewer: *trying to hide massive work-boner while noticeably sweating* Go on….
Lmaoooooo true. Reblogging for those looking to add marketable skills to their applications
This is being reblogged on my main. Learning Excel, even at my basic level (I don’t know how to do most of the above), has made me far more employable as well. I’m probably the biggest Luddite on this site too. If I can learn it you can too.
(you can ignore this. Here’s your ignore-this permission-slip. Don’t drop it)
So… Hello. I usually don’t comment on these because they feel big enough already, but whatever. I’m clearly trying out different ways of visualizing things so I hope you don’t mind the inconsistencies. Feel free to tell me if there’s a style you prefer (and why it’s better for your learning?), but you’re not my boss so no promises. No promises to my boss either for that matter.
Anyway, I’m also making a couple pics here and there kind of Black Lives Matter-y and you can’t stop me, but it does mean that I don’t necessarily use the most recognizible words for the Hanja? (Like for 수 the most obvious one is obviously “math - 수학”) You’re just gonna have to live with that.
Also I really appreciate likes and reblogs? It’s pretty motivating, but I’m not your boss either so just do your thing.
(this is why I don’t comment things here. I ramble. Stay safe out there. Bye)
(also used as a grammatical principle (amongst/between options/actions) and in words like 人問 (인간) meaning “human” which isn’t really related to time or space)
同
Meaning - Same
Korean syllable - 동
Korean name - 한가지 동
(동성애자 isn’t one of the examples in the lesson, but I couldn’t help myself)
(also for 共同體 (공동체 - community) I used some fanart from the TV show Community. I usually try not to use references/pop-culture, but I was bored, ok?)
